from Larry Brooks of the New York Post,
This isn’t so much about whether a team can succeed when it commits 49.7 percent of its cap allotment to four forwards in what has become a flat-earth NHL. It is about what happens when the forwards who embody your vision and around whom you have built your team flame out spectacularly in the crucible. It is about what happens when you might have given the money to the wrong people.
It is about what happens when Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner, neither of whom has a particularly appealing public persona, fail to produce after a season of producing zany numbers. It is what happens when there isn’t enough support to compensate for a series-ending injury sustained early in Game 1 by John Tavares. It is what happens when Willy Nylander becomes the lone member of the remaining amigos to elevate his game.
This isn’t quite the same as the Capitals’ repeated failures last decade to get through the Penguins. It is not tantamount to the Rangers running into the Islanders wall in the early 1980s or the original Jets’ inability scale the Edmonton mountain later in that decade.
The Maple Leafs have lost five consecutive opening-round series (including last year’s qualifying round under the bubble) to four different teams. They have been beaten by the Caps, by the Bruins (twice), by the Blue Jackets and now by the Canadiens. Eight times, the Leafs have skated into potential clinchers. Eight times, they have lost. Five times over the past three years, they played a winner-take-all contest. Five times, they were on the wrong side of the handshake line.
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